Music was my first love

‘A DIVINE GIFT’

- RAVI GOVENDER

IN THE roaring 1980s, a singer named John Miles had a mammoth hit with a song called Music. It was a masterly fusion of vocal and instrumental, and the refrain went like this: “Music was my first love and it will be my last: music of the future and music of the past. To live without my music is impossible to do. In this world of trouble, my music pulls me through.”

Though I cannot play a solitary note and my singing is reserved for the shower, I can relate to Mile’s lyrics. I’d even go so far as to say that I was “born to music”.

Here’s why I say this: According to my mom, I had been a “breech baby” — you know the kind of nonconformist who decides to enter the world feet first.

Although I was her second child, a breech birth is not something anyone looks forward to. Providentially for mom and me, the ambulance driver who rushed us to hospital was like a cross between Schumacher and a forklift operator. And, as my mom describes it, the shaky ride from home in Victoria Street to King Edward VIII Hospital caused me to “invert” and adopt a more conventional position.